George & Rue (13 page)

Passersby stopped, heart-stoppingly, to help. A middle-aged white man and his thin, youngish wife determined that their truck—a red something-ton Ford, could salvage George’s car. They hooked a chain around the bumper and hauled the sedan slowly out of the ditch. Getting the black Ford car out of the white snow ditch was a long, freezing struggle for the red Ford truck. Georgie was nauseous with fear the trunk would flip open, giving him a lot to explain. The trunk latch creaked, squeaked, but didn’t let go, and then the car was on nice, white terra firma again. George said his thank-yous to his Good Samaritans, who took the ten bucks he proffered, then he said his goodbyes. He jumped back in the hearse with what felt like three inches of icicles hanging from the rims of his eyes. He now felt his living difference from Silver.

My pulse is tinny; his blood was brassy.

It was on to Fredericton, the car engine noxious, snow copying a hurricane.

George remembered he’d promised Rue he’d leave the car and its corpse in Saint John. But now that he was steering his fate, he could relinquish neither the vehicle nor its silent passenger. Dead, Silver was as close to him as Rue.

About two miles this side of Oromocto, Georgie met a Mi’kmaq hitchhiker, young, tan, black silk-haired, husky, with blue jeans, a salt-and-pepper cap, a backpack, and, dangling there from, a typewriter. The lad, Noel Christmas, bore all this weight jauntily. George offered him a ride. Noel was also bound for Fred Town.

George had to ask, “Why tote a typewriter?”

Noel said, “I’m a poet—like E. Pauline Johnson and Bliss Carman. Know em?”

Georgie: “Nope.”

Noel said, “I’m goin to Fredericton to visit Bliss Carman’s grave.”

Georgie let the poet out at the outskirts of Fredericton. He moved down a by-road spiking off from the Wilsey Road, near the Dominion Experimental Farm, and parked in brush on the side of the road going up toward a train track (to which he was oblivious). He got out of the car, in swirling snow, and hurled the ignition keys into a brook. Nigh 2:20 p.m. now. He locked all the car doors but one (an oversight). He strode quickly to the Wilsey Road, abandoning a shiny black car, all that gleaming promise of America and prosperity, amid bush, brush, remnants of the raw Canadian Shield and the scraping, scraggly terrors of the Ice Age. In fine, the car was visibly out of place where it was.

George’d spotted a snowy owl at Saint John, hovering above the river. Now he observed a gull near Fredericton.

George walked further down the road when a truck, operated by Moses Klein, coming from the city dump, pulled alongside, so that black-bearded, heavy-set Moses could ask George where he was goin.

George said, “Victoria Hospital.”

Moses: “Are ya sick? Ya don’t look sick.”

George: “I’m going up to see the wife and my baby girl.”

Moses said, “Hop in.”

George dozed for blissful minutes. For one hundred miles plus, he’d worn a dead man’s cap, and had cried and got drunk in mourning, from Fredericton to Saint John and back again.

G
EORGIE visited Blondola at about 3 p.m. He stayed with her and Desiah an hour. He left money to pay Dr. Pond, he caught the bus to Eatman Avenue. No one was home. Everyone—Rufus, Plumsy, Otho—was at Mrs. Roach’s. George joined em. It was the first time he and Rue had glimpsed each other since early that day. Their eyes hardly saw each other. Guilt was one reason, wine the other. (Rue was so blue-mouthed blotted, he be all blue-blasted.) Then, under a debris field of clouds, Rue left to go shopping.

After talking with Mrs. Roach awhile, George walked to the corner store and bought twenty-five dollars’ worth of groceries, plus baby oil, baby powder, different things. He got home just in time to see Rue unwrap his parcels. George then ask for something for the house.

Rue said, “I’ve spent every dime and dollar of Silver.”

Cranky, George said, “If you ain’t goin to put no cash towards the house or wood, you ain’t goin to eat none.”

Rue chuckled: “I’s goin to eat at Mrs. Roach’s then.” George say, “Go ahead—until I tell Roach bout you and his wife.”

Rue said, “Yeah, and I’m gonna tell Blondola bout you and Lovea. I bet you saw her last night, eh?”

George was flustered. “I got the house full up with food, and it’s goin to stay like that until Blondola comes out the hospital,
and I will get some wood on Monday. I’m goin to try hard this winter to see if the house can be kept warm and that the wife and the children has clothes, wood, and food, and you ain’t goin enjoy none of it.”

Rue guffawed. “You know, Joygee, all that money’s tainted: t’ain’t mine an t’ain’t yours.”

Rue laughed more. He opened a box and took out a new fedora—black, with a feather—and put it on. He tried on his new black overcoat, a black scarf, black galoshes on his new black shoes, and posed like a gangster. He admired his new black pants and the silver-buckled black belt (his keepsake of Easter) that set them off so splendidly. He planned now to leave piss-ass Fredericton and go back to pianissimo Halifax. He’d scoop up India and go to Montreal and settle and never banter with bozo Georgie again.

The sun hung before them like a gigantic noose swinging the world. Rue uncorked a slim, glimmering bottle of burgundy—delicious grapes of wrath—got two tumblers and poured a dash for George, a splash for himself.

“George, you did leave the car in Saint John, didn’t you? And you did leave Silver’s body where it was, right?”

George nodded yes and drank the red wine.

Then, Rue sliced him off a chunk of brown bread.

Écoutez: il nous est indifférent que ce soit l’un ou lautre qui ait commis le crime…, si un homme est un homme, un nègre est un nègre, et il nous suffit de deux bras, deux jambes à casser, d’un cou à passer dans le noeud coulant, et notre justice est heureuse.

—JEAN GENET

O
N MONDAY, January 10, at 2:14p.m., a brakeman, Hub Howard, walking in front of a creeping freight, spied a spanking-new Ford sedan awkward in the bush, saw that one of its doors was open, saw that a dog had been in there and shitted. Suspicious, Howard radioed the RCMP.

The Mounties’ sensitive eyes spied ghost traces of blood at once. They called a mechanic, who unhinged and removed the back seat so they could peer inside the locked trunk. A locksmith cracked the trunk and then they called the coroner. The coroner, Sylvanus Mitchum, with the help of police officers who knew the taxi driver, determined that the body in the trunk was that of Nacre Pearly Burgundy, and that he was dead due to a blow to the head that was probably inflicted by a blunt object. The police photographer came to map out and snap the body; Mitchum examined it. An ambulance blossomed redly in the afternoon like blood seeping through a sheet. Then a black hearse—from McAdam’s Funeral Home (“First Choice for Last Respects”)—parked beside the black taxi. Finally, a tow truck arrived to bear away the comatose car.

Citizenry, cops, and always rabid politicians went mad after that railway brakeman found Silver’s dinged-up car and cops eyed Silver’s dinged-in skull. Folks turned edgy, narrow, and volatile. People locked up everything and wanted to shoot any suspect face. Pandemonium pushed to panic. Fredericton’s
two hardware stores sold out of shotguns and shot and newfangled locks. Lights burned all night, pleasing the kerosene and kilowatt merchants.

The police suspected a gang. Their maniacal manhunt triggered, as usual, raiding of the Negro quarter—“camp”—of Barker’s Point. Mounties had to check every outhouse, every sty, and looked ready to kill. There was vandalism as they entered tubercular kitchens and crippled bedrooms; the threat of vigilantism where they found ingenious stills. Carrying Tommy guns, they itched to spray the shantytown with bullets. Quizzical cops handcuffed every black man or boy for the routine third degree, but no movie-style roughhousing. Fact was, none was necessary. Them Negroes, even surly, I-don’t-like-white-folks-none ones, had to clear their lives of this bothersome homicide. So folks gossiped about Georgie drivin the dead man’s taxi, but it was easy to mix up Coloured guys at night. Sides, they figured the killers were smarter than a clown like Georgie.

After two days of shakin down Barker’s Point, siftin through squalor, as the sweating cops saw it, and even haulin in riff-raff, the dragnet was annoyingly empty. Soon, blood-sniffing tabloids in Fredericton and Saint John, cities that despised each other (pitting the bureaucrats in one against the workers in the other), would be caterwauling in harmony. A stink sharper than the sulphurous, bad-egg smell of pulp-and-paper mills would rise up stabbingly like the shittiest stench of Hades. If the Negroes were innocent, every white man was maybe guilty. The case might drag on, putting re-elections at risk.

Then dawned the minor but scalding sunlight of flashbulbs. Silver got front-page, red-carpet treatment in his casket, and hundreds of exasperated and vengeful citizens congressed alongside. The funeral cortège was a moving flotilla of black taxis from across New Brunswick. Mourners
motored graciously through Fredericton to the packed cemetery. Folks worried sick about their own flesh.

Tabloids acted grief-stricken. They was contrite about what happened, wished they’d cared more for public servants like cabbies. They commented about life withering like snow, about the way light tears itself to bits, struggling through pines, about how anyone’s blood is always like a newborn’s, pungently fresh and precious, about how rock could spill and fall toward no end. They wept for a crushed yellow flower in the funeral parlour, the mashed body of a fly.

Georgie saw em headlines; he felt sick bout all em smarting feelings. Nausea shook him from clenched jaw to quivering bowels when he thought of Silver displaying the photos of golden Donna and his pretty, priceless children. Georgie knew he could get all the entertainment in the world just by watching his own babies play. Then he’d vomit tears because, my God, Silver was dead and his moolah all pissed away.

George knew no theology, even less about law, but he treasured one redemptive fact: he hadn’t tagged Silver; no, he’d just tagged along with Rue, who had. Georgie believed his part in the scrape was just layin the hammered man’s body aside, then takin some bloodstained bills. George prayed, prayed, prayed, when he wasn’t drunk, when he was breathing in the milky new-baby smell of Desiah, or when he was cuddled beside Blondola, spoon fashion, staying warm, his hands cupping, gently, her full breasts, while January worsened outdoors and Rue puttered in the kitchen, so, so innocently, never registering any tic or sigh about his and George’s
successful
execution of murder. While Rufus sat in the lamp-lit kitchen, guzzling red wine and waving his hand back and forth in time to some soundless music, George wept silently, but fully. If only he’d gone muskratting in April, fixin traps in logs and lettin em catch their feet and drown, he could’ve got pocket money, nice money.

Feeling his hot moisture trickling onto her neck, Blondola, so fleshily good and rose-smelling, turned and asked, “Is ya cryin cause we’s poor, or cause you’s happy to be a papa again?”

George nodded.

D
OETECTIVES Michael Evans—forty, wiry, and severe—and Ishmael Stark—thirtyish, dirty, and squat—visited every garage, pool hall, tavern, welfare office, and brothel in the district. Sallow, with dark brown hair streaked grey, Evans was a natural partner for Stark, who was pale, with hair as black as shoe polish. The pair were like village poets, scrutinizing every aspect of their fellow and sister citizens’ lives, recording details, eavesdropping, jotting down info. They were convinced the killer—maybe plural—of Nacre Pearly Burgundy was a culprit who’d needed money but no getaway car. Why leave a Fredericton taxi in Fredericton? They figured the murderer was local, didn’t own a car, but knew the roads. The two detectives fixated on Barker’s Point, where taxis were always shunting. They sucked up rumours—from citizens like Yamila James, Jehial States, and Zelda King—that ex-con George and ex-con Rufus were seen in Silver’s company, in his car, and with remarkable, miracle cash that’d appeared as suddenly as a blizzard. So, they’d converse with chatterbox, chicken-thievin, high-steppin, firewood-stealin George. That Coloured fellow were not, they thought, smart enough to murder and obliterate the evidence, but he’d surely help pinpoint Silver’s last movements. They brought George downtown, with no promises or threats, only a wish for him to help them
reduce their honest ignorance. They knew he’d been in the car that night. What else happened?

George took scared, but glued himself to his alibi, telling the Mounties he was gambling all night on January 7, 1949, but had gone to Jehial States, with Silver, lookin to invite him to see his wife and newborn girl. He’d had Silver drop him off at Barker’s Point, maybe, must’ve been, bout 10 p.m.

“That’s the last I seen of him.”

Stark and Evans let Georgie go because they had no evidence, and Georgie had a newborn. The next day, January 12, George was asked back to the
RCMP
depot for a few more questions. All day he waited to be questioned. No one got around to it until that night. (The delay was deliberate—to give his conscience time to sober up and to make him feel too tired to lie.) The ceiling lights in the corridor bit like barbed wire into his eyes. The cop station bristled with filing cabinets—as if the files held the real firepower: an accusatory bullet for every man, woman, and child. George cheered up when Evans, wearing grey pants and a grey-pinstripe black vest, and Stark, in a black suit and tie, finally showed up, apologizing extravagantly, carrying big mugs of coffee, even one for him. Then they entered, all palsy-wellsy, all swell buddies, the interrogation room.

Evans and Stark were pleasant, respectful, in flattering ways that white men almost never demonstrated to Georgie. Evans pointed out, even before they settled down to chat, just chat, “Georgie, it’s wrong to murder, yes; but history’s full of wrongs.” George felt vindicated, important. The slaying of Silver was sorry, yes, but not an earthquake.

Stark nodded. “Some things gotta be understood as accidents, not evils.” What everyone agreed on was the need to preserve the beauty of family. Georgie could appreciate this, eh, bein a lovin father and a loyal husband. He could help Evans and Stark resolve this case and help Mrs. Burgundy and
her children feel better about the “accident” that had downsized their family.

His questioners were probing, gentle, and relentless, but not bullying. George never sweated his alibi. He said no incriminating word. His pursuers kept at him until five the next morning. They kept asking him questions gently, gently. Finally, George asked if he could see Blondola. The Mounties agreed, and an officer was dispatched to bring her from her bed, where she couldn’t sleep anyway, down to the station.

Blondola and Georgie met alone in Evans’s stacked-up-file-ridden and cigar-smoke-saturated and Scotch-smell office. When Blondola saw her husband, lookin child-like in Evans’s swivel chair, and downcast, pain drilled her heart, for here she be, standin in the Fred Town Mountie keep, with her man in trouble, and two babes in her arms, sometimes looking at her and squalling, sometimes reaching for their father. She cried and she cried and she cried when George whisper her that story. She couldn’t believe she’d let that obscene jailbird, Rue, into her house. No, no, no. Only one thing to do: confess Rue did it. Everyone in Fredericton knew George was a rascal, but no killer. But Rue? He was bloody trouble from the start.

Blondola say, “You and me, Jawgee, we was here for three years, doin well for ourselves, till yer brother come botherin us. Why should we suffer for what he did? Since all you did was take the dead man’s money, we’ll just pay it back, even if it takes you ten years. We’ll pay it back, and Rue can go to Hell.” Blondola sat beside Georgie, weeping. Her head rested on his shoulder like Silver’s had rested on Rue’s.

George took Otho in his arms and looked into that tiny face so much his own and he thought of Silver looking so glad to welcome he and Rue into his car. The tears shot from his eyes to join those of his wife, and he was seeing Desiah now, his brand-new baby girl, through a veil of blurring tears. As
his hands fumbled over his babes and his wife, and hers stroked his face, he could hardly breathe, but managed to croak, “You go home now, Blondola. I’m gonna come home too. After I tell these mens what Rufus did, I’m gonna come home too.” Blondola looked at him close. “You sure, Joygee? You sure?” He nodded and explained: “I took Silver’s money, but I never even scratched Silver.”

Blondola and the children left. Then Evans lunged back into his office.

George’s
mens rea
was fully engaged now. He asked the coppers to bring a pen and paper to take down his statement: he couldn’t print and weep simultaneously. Next, he told them everything—they pressed him to tell them everything—that incriminated Rufus, omitting only his own adultery. Lovea became a “friend” to whom he had kindly given twenty dollars and a pair of nylons.

George led the amiable Evans and Stark to his house and dredged up, while a frightened Blondola observed (and while Rue was out, sporting or drinking), the charred ring, hammer head, and watch from the stove ashes. The watch was still silvery and the ring was still gold and the hammer was still black amid the heaped-up ash. Back in the gravel pit, George helped the detectives retrieve the smashed milk bottle shards where he had so feverishly scoured away Silver’s bleeding. They’d had snow kicked over them, but George pluck em up easily. He pointed out the site where he’d halved Silver’s dough with Rue; he mentioned he gave the cabby cap to Lovea Borden in Saint John. Later, George directed the Mounties to Minto, where he showed them to Junior Clarke’s place and to the house where he’d gotten liquor with Frenchy. At Oak Point, the cops combed the site where the car’d slid off the road. In Saint John, George had to beg an infuriated Dutchy and an anxious Lovea to answer intimidating questions from Evans
and Stark. Back on the by-road near the Experimental Farm, George located the car keys in the brook. He fix a damning case against his brother, including the grisly detail about Rue picking up the dead Burgundy’s black rosary and crucifix and hurling em into the woods.

George co-operated uncomplainingly with the Mounties. He confessed easily that Rufus James Hamilton murdered N. P. Burgundy. Still, the cops charged him with capital murder, despite all his charitable, earnest testimony and general good citizenship.

When the Mounties rolled Georgie’s manual digits, all ten, in the fingerprint pad’s black ink, he knew he was indelibly, incurably, black. The ink tingled like acid.

Then, too, the inescapable difficulty was that
he
and Rue had gone out for money and got a man killed. The saintly Silver—a veteran—’d been bludgeoned dead for the sake of $180 or so, his wallet depleted, his crucifix tossed wantonly in woods (where it ended up in a police dog’s jaws). George was deeply micked up in the affair. He’d admitted he’d called the taxi, but why couldn’t the police, the press, the court realize he’d never hit a man in his life? Didn’t they know that when it came time for him to bash Silver, he couldn’t do it?

“I had intentions to hit. But I couldn’t—and didn’t—slug Silver.”

Was it his fault Rue was a bad man to leave on a road alone with a hammer in his hands? He wished he were home facing his “fambly", not in York County Gaol facing the gallows.

George had three motives for aiding the Crown: 1) he hadn’t brained Burgundy; 2) Rufus were a vicious drifter; he—George—be a daddy, a hubby, and a property’d taxpayer; 3) the police kept him well fed while he was singing. He was finally eatin good regularly. He didn’t like prison, but he liked jail food, much of it home-cooked by wives of cops and
sheriffs, wives who felt sorry for young men who’d lacked good mothering. George had pies, muffins, cakes; all the pop in the world; orange juice, apple juice; milk, tea, coffee; sausage, turkey, mackerel, chicken, tuna, hamburger, beef; cookies—peanut butter and ginger snaps and chocolate fudge; fresh bread and beans with pork and lard; even pineapple rings. He’d'd no idea that some people ate so handsomely.

The
RCMP
dispatched a car to get Rue, and it came back with a good-looking known felon who wouldn’t talk and didn’t want to talk to George. But Rue was most angry with himself for not foreseeing that George’d fuck up everything by driving the car back to Fredericton and parking it where it’d be spotted easily.